This is an interesting topic and I think you did a very good job writing about it. It does kind of bother me that a less-informative and borderline-spammy but well-optimized website can rank consistently higher for certain keywords than a site which has excellent information but is not as well optimized for those same keywords. Does Google "monitor" bounce rate on traffic that is sent to a website via certain keywords? If a website has a 99.99% bounce rate from traffic for certain keywords, does that eventually hurt its ranking?

This is a great post, there are a lot of tools here that I have never even heard of! One of my favorite tools (and one I am kind of surprised was not mentioned in this post) is Google Analytics. I think it is really useful for SEO purposes because you can see which keywords are bringing visitors to your site, and how those visitors are interacting with your site - for instance, if they all leave after one second on your website, maybe you should focus on some different keywords so you're attracting the right visitors! :) Anyways, that's just my two cents... :)